Election office to get tough with fake voters

With more than seven lakh suspected 'fake' voters in Delhi's electoral rolls the election office of Delhi has decided to crack the whip.

After publishing the draft electoral roll in the second week of January 2013, the election office will sift through the list once again and weed out fake voters from the list.

Delhi's chief election officer Vijay Dev said these fake voters - their names are present in the electoral rolls but their photographs are missing - stand between the Delhi election office's aim of having a 100 per cent electoral roll.

Many of these voters have not even applied for voter identity cards.

"To verify their existence, we will first send a notice to these voters to furnish their photographs so that we can update our electoral roll. Names of all such voters who fail to respond will be struck off the voters' list," Dev said.

Of 1.18 crore registered voters, there are about 7.21 lakh whose photos are missing from the roll. Five lakh of them have never got the photo ID card made. Mehrauli, Karawal Nagar, Tughlaqabad, Badarpur and Sangam Vihar are some assembly segments where more than 13 per cent voters do not have photos in the voters' list.

Senior election department officials said they had been striving to update the voters' list and publish the photo electoral roll for many years.

The election office has also failed to achieve the target of issuing electoral photo identity cards to all voters.

The Election Commission of India too had expressed its displeasure on Delhi's failure to achieve the target.

Following a house-to-house survey, the booth-level officers had reported about 14 lakh fake voters. But senior election officials said the number may not be that high.

"There are several tenants who change their houses and the house-owners do not give correct information to our teams. But these seven lakh odd voters who do not have photos in the list definitely arouse suspicion," an official said.

"We will update the list before the Assembly elections in December 2013," the official added.